On getting the best deal with variable electric rates

Note: The following was written by my friend Dan Wallach, who thought I might be interested in sharing it here. He was right. My thanks to Dan for putting this together.

Everybody in Houston has the ability to select any one of hundreds of different electrical pricing plans from a variety of vendors. If you visit the PowerToChoose.com web site, you can see all the different rates listed. Some are “variable” rate, with the lowest currently advertised at 5.3 cents/kWh. Others let you lock in a fixed rate for some period of time (the cheapest currently listed is 8.3 cents/kWh for a six month term). A few plans are “indexed” (meaning they track the spot price of natural gas), with the cheapest currently going for 10.7 cents/kWh. On top of all these different plan styles, there is also a significant variation in the “percentage of renewable content” from one plan to another, as well as variation in various freebies and incentives.

I wanted to keep it simple. Just give me the lowest price, please. I initially signed up with Amigo Energy, who in 2008 offered me something like 7.5 cents/kWh without requiring me to make any kind of deposit. At the time, they were one of the cheapest vendors around. That sounded great, and they even gave me free tickets at one point to a Houston Dynamo playoff game. Thanks! I didn’t really pay much attention to my electrical prices again until I noticed a recent bill was over 13 cents/kWh, earlier this summer, when the extreme heat was giving me some extreme electrical bills. I called them up and they said that they had discontinued the program I signed up for, so they unilaterally decided to raise my price to a much higher number. Oh, and would I like to switch to another plan? Lovely.

Lesson 1: “Variable rates” aren’t connected to much of anything beyond the whims of the executives who set these rates. If you read the legal verbiage closely, they can change your rate, at any time, to any price they want.

I want the lowest rate I can get. PowerToChoose.com listed several vendors offering 5.5 (give or take) cents/kWh, including one company I’d actually heard of before: Reliant Energy. Several of the vendors explicitly say that their cheap rate is “introductory” and you’ll be switched to the regular rate after one month. Reliant, however, makes no such caveat, at least not that was immediately obvious, so earlier this summer I dumped Amigo and went with Reliant. My first month was cheap. The bill that just arrived, however, averages to 7.5 cents/kWh (including taxes) on 2061 kWh of charges. That’s a $155.39 bill, which is still reasonable in the grand scheme of things for an August in Houston, but it wasn’t the $113.36 that I would have paid at my original rate, either. Oh, and if I call up Reliant on the phone to complain, the contract seems to say that they can charge me $5.95 to speak to a human being. No thanks.

Lesson 2: See lesson 1.

Challenge: how can I consistently pay these low advertised rates? Do I have to switch companies every month? As it turns out, every one of these companies is required to publish an “electrical facts label,” and those tend to include a pointer to a web page with their historical prices. The table below has the actual rates that I’ve been able to glean from these web sites. This was far more difficult to put together than it should have been. (Notes: all of this data was compiled on September 11 from PowerToChoose.com and the various vendors’ web sites. All prices are based on monthly rates at 1000 kWh usage and include CenterPoint delivery charges. If you’re outside of Houston and don’t have CenterPoint, your rates will be different. If you use less than 1000 kWh, many vendors tack on a surcharge that increases your effective electrical rate.)

Company / Product

Initial Advertised Rate (at 1000 kWh / month)

Historical Rates (at 1000 kWh / month)

First Choice Power (“First Choice Web Advantage Flex”)

5.3¢

No historical rates are on their web site for this specific product. Other products are much more expensive (all greater than 13¢).

Reliant Energy (“Basic Power Flex Plan”)

5.4¢

8.2 – 10.0¢

Pennywise Power (“Wise Buy Monthly”)

5.4¢

6.3 – 7.2¢

StarTex Power (“Promotional Month to Month”)

5.5¢

11.3 – 13.8¢

Bounce Energy (“Thrifty Saver Promotional”)

5.5¢

11.2 – 13.9¢, but with various promotions, coupons, etc.

Mega Man LP (“Mega Man Savings Plan”)

5.5¢

11.8 – 12.5¢

Veteran Energy (“Freedom Month to Month”)

5.9¢

12-13¢

Frontier Utilities (“Winter 11 Special Online Intro”)

6.4¢

7.8-8.3¢ (only two historical prices are present, so this isn’t very meaningful)

APNA Energy (“Promotional Newcomer Variable”)

7.3¢

12.3-13.1¢

Beyond this, prices jump two cents or so and we’re starting to see the various “renewable” energy products. What’s actually going on when you sign up for one of these plans is, at best, unclear. The electrons being pumped into your house are coming from the same power plants over the same grid, no matter who you’re actually paying for your service. (Hint: very few of the companies listed above actually own real electric plants. They buy power wholesale and sell it to you at retail.) What you are really doing, when you buy “renewable” power, is buying the same power as anybody else, plus you’re buying “renewable energy credits” (RECs). There’s a whole secondary market for RECs, which the “renewable” power generators sell and which you’re indirectly buying. In theory, this incentivizes power companies to increase their “renewable” capacity so they can capture those extra dollars themselves. In practice? There’s a very good 2009 study on the REC market. At one point, REC prices went negative! Suffice to say that the REC market is a work in progress.

If your goal is to reduce carbon emissions, you could buy “renewable” power, which might eventually do something, or you could invest in making your house more energy efficient, which does something right now. I’m going with plan B (“ask me about overpriced LED lighting!”), but you’re welcome to choose plan A if you want. So what do you pay for “100% renewable” power at variable prices?

Company / Product

Initial Advertised Rate (at 1000 kWh / month)

Historical Rates (at 1000 kWh / month)

Bounce Energy (“Organic Power Promotional”)

9.3¢

12.9-14.4¢

Reliant Energy (“Monthly Flex 100% Texas Wind”)

9.4¢

no historical data provided for this product

Kinetic Energy (“Go Green Monthly”)

9.9¢

7.5-13.3¢

Texas Power (“Promo Pure Variable Month to Month”)

9.9¢

no historical data provided for this product

Gexa Energy (“SmoothStart Green”)

10.4¢

no historical data provided for this product

Okay, let’s try to draw some conclusions. First, the low rates you see advertised on PowerToChoose.com are strictly for the first month of service. After that, your rates will go up, sometimes by a surprising amount. If you want to continue paying the low rate, then you’re going to have to be vigilant about what you’re being charged and you’re going to have to change companies every single month.

If you find that bothersome, then the best deal on the board today seems to be PennyWise. PennyWise is owned by NRG Energy, which also owns Reliant and Green Mountain Energy. In effect, PennyWise is their “discount” brand and Reliant is the “commercial” brand. Whatever. I’m switching to PennyWise and we’ll see whether they continue to have good prices or not.

Sidebar: What if I wanted to put in solar panels?

I’ve been pondering this for years. The front side of my house faces south. There’s a big area on the front roof, unobstructed by trees or anything else, that could well have some nice big solar panels on it. Reliant (but not PennyWise) offers two different programs, announced earlier this year. In one, you “lease” all the gear and in the other, you buy your own gear. Either way, you sell power back to the grid when you’ve got excess generation. Nowhere on any of their web pages are there actual hard numbers. If I buy, what will the gear and installation cost? If I lease, what do I pay up front and per month? Can I buy/sell power with any company on PowerToChoose or do I have to deal with Reliant? What do I pay on and off-peak for power under the variable plan? (I’ve only been able to find an old copy of their fact sheet which has uncompetitive prices.)

I don’t want to deal with a salesman. Please just post all the numbers online, maybe in a convenient Excel spreadsheet, so I can play with it on my own. If you want to be cool, put together an online calculator, like the banks do for mortgages, that asks you all the right questions and then estimates all the costs. Help me calculate when I break even on the deal.

8 Comments

Bonus fun fact: Let’s say you’ve got a $9.95 “surcharge” if your electrical consumption is below 1000 kWh per month, and let’s say you’re otherwise paying 5.3¢ per kWh. Divide those two numbers (9.95 / 0.053) and you get 187 kWh, which is to say that if your monthly power consumption is anywhere between 813 and 999 kWh, you will *save money* by wasting that extra energy. Leave the lights on and the windows open! Run the oven all night! And save money.

Of course, doing this for real would require knowing exactly when they take readings from your meter and you’d have to pay careful attention that you didn’t go over. Probably not practical, certainly not environmentally responsible, but that’s what many of these vendors have rationally incentivized you to do with their pricing.

How about San Antonio? Here’s what a friend of mine who lives there wrote:

In San Antonio, they decided not to privatize the electric companies, so our electric company is run by the city. Guess what – we pay 6.68 cents per kWh, with an additional 1.75 cents per kWh after the first 600 kWh during the summer. Even with the price bump in the summer, our electric bills are less than what the ‘free market’ produced in Houston. Can any of the ‘free markets will solve all of our problems’ people can explain that to me? Oh, and after I bought my house, I blew insulation into my attic and got a $300 rebate.

Dan’s on to something I wish was more widely known, “If you use less than 1000 kWh, many vendors tack on a surcharge that increases your effective electrical rate.” Talk about perverse incentives, those of us reducing our footprint are subsidizing the energy hogs. And the San Antonio situation is exhibit A for the case against privatization and de-regulation. spread the word.

At first I thought it might be nice to have so many OPTIONS for electrical service (since we have 1 and only 1) but after reading your article I’m thinking that all the comparison pricing would drive me crazy.

I will say that the best thing we ever did was put double-paned insulated windows on this house! It is absolutely amazing how much they have cut our electric bill.

[…] I read an analysis on Chuck Kuffner’s blog about how to find the best deal on electricity in Texas. Some areas in Texas allow consumers to choose the provider of electricity to their homes. (But not […]